The best food matches for Amarone

A recent lunch* and discussion hosted by Masi at Heston Blumenthal’s Dinner gave a revealing glimpse of what the best food pairings for amarone might be.

It also highlighted - as with many wines - that there is more than one style. It was fascinating how the Masi range had evolved from the 1990s to the present day - the most recent vintages seeming lighter and more elegant than the traditional robust style. ‘Light’ might seem an odd word to use in conjunction with a 15% plus wine but it’s a question of balance or how it feels in the mouth. Today’s amarone - well Masi’s at any rate - wears its alcohol lightly - a deliberate move, it seems, to bring it more in tune with contemporary, particularly Asian cuisine. And it’s not a tannic wine.

Of course there’s amarone and amarone. According to Sandro Boscaini, over 50% of amarone is now produced by co-ops creating a downward pressure on prices that is worrying for traditional producers like Masi who still use the expensive, time-consuming technique of drying grapes on bamboo mats (many other producers now use plastic and dry the grapes for a much shorter time).

Some of the more traditional food pairings obviously date from a time when amarone was considerably cheaper than it is now. They include, according to the recently published Amarone by Kate Singleton*, rustic stews - some made with amarone, sweet-tasting meats like horsemeat and strong cheeses.

And Boscaini’s favourite pairing? “Take a bite-sized fragment of parmesan cheese and a teaspoon of acacia honey, pop them both in your mouth, and chew them to savour the taste then take a sip of amarone and enjoy the resulting harmonies.”

See also The best food pairings for amarone

Fish is not normally suggested as a pairing for amarone but, according to Singleton’s book, sommelier Kazuo Naito recommends it with anago con nitsume, stewed eel cooked in a sweet soy sauce with some wasabi to refresh the palate. In fact it seems to be the soy sauce that’s the key. Naito also recommends it with chicken teriyaki and spiced chicken livers in soy sauce.

See also this account of a meal in Verona with Bertani.

* This book is sponsored by Masi. I also ate at Dinner as their guest. This lunch took place in 2013

What to eat with Cloudy Bay

For most people the New Zealand winery Cloudy Bay is synonymous with sauvignon blanc but their range now extends to sparkling, sweet and red wines, a message underlined by a dinner at Hix Mayfair (in Brown’s Hotel) the other day.

Hix’s style - like that of St John - is minimalist: carefully sourced ingredients cooked as simply as possible. In fact a couple of his suppliers were at the table including the ebullient Peter Hannan of the Meat Merchant whose whose fantastic guanciale I tried the other day.

Cloudy Bay’s wines, on the other hand are generous and full of personality - classically ‘new world’. How would the two get on?

The best matches ironically were not with sauvignon but with pinot of which they now have two - one from their home territory of Marlborough, the other from Central Otago.

The more delicate Marlborough one - a 2012 - was paired with a rib of Peter Hannan’s superb bacon with Bramley apple sauce and the more robust 2011 Te Wahi with two courses: a Glenarm Estate steak with Hampshire ‘pennybuns’ (ceps) with parsley and a washed rind cheese called Guernsey Goddess made by Alex James (of Blur fame) from Guernsey milk and washed in Somerset Cider Brandy. That was the biggest surprise because although the cheese wasn’t particularly ‘stinky’ it was very rich and creamy but was a fantastic match with the sweet-fruited pinot.

The better known sauvignon - now on the 2014 vintage - kicked off the dinner with a threesome of oysters (I like the way Hix avoids the word ‘trio’) - some natives, rocks with cucumber green chilli and shallots and some deep-fried rocks served with a rich bearnaise-y style mayo (at his Fish and Oyster House in Dorset he serves a ransom mayonnaise but as ransoms aren’t in season I’m guessing he used herbs). That was the best match of the three but the natives were somewhat overwhelmed by the wine and the oysters with rocks and chilli not quite as good a match as you’d expect. (I think it needed more Asian-style seasoning which isn’t really Hix)

The next course of Wye Valley asparagus (a second, late harvest) and purslane salad was spot on though. There’s more going on than just asparagus flavours in the Cloudy Bay Sauvignon but enough to link to the dish - an explosion of green herbal flavours that was just delicious.

The course I didn’t think quite worked was a steamed fillet of St Mary’s Bay turbot (below) with sea beet and rape-seed oil where the fish was ironically so fresh it threw the accompanying 2013 Cloudy Bay chardonnay out of kilter, emphasising its oak rather than its creaminess. I think an older vintage or a light butter sauce of some kind - or even melted butter (better than rapeseed oil with this wine) - would have made it work.

And the luscious 2007 Late Harvest riesling wasn’t done any huge flavours by the Peruvian Gold chocolate mousse. Given Hix uses British ingredients it would have been better with something apple-based.

So great food, great wine but only a limited number of great matches in my opinion. It’s a problem with wine dinners. Restaurants don’t have the time or staff resources to tweak or change their dishes to match the wines and its hard taking wines out of their natural register - in Cloudy Bay’s case, the big flavours of Asian-accented New Zealand food. That doesn’t mean of course you shouldn’t do it. A preliminary run-through tends to highlight any problems.

I attended the dinner as a guest of Cloudy Bay.

Image credit: Matt Boulton, CC BY-SA 2.0

Tea & Tapas: does it work?

As a massive sherry fan I confess that I find it hard to envisage any other drink with tapas but when you’re invited to experience an off-the-wall pairing you go - or at least I do.

The hosts were Lalani & Co, a boutique tea company that deals with small artisanal, often organic growers. I’d come across them at the RAW wine fair earlier this year where I discovered that tea was the perfect antidote to a long afternoon’s wine tasting. And the venue, El Pirata Detapas, a modern tapas bar and restaurant in Westbourne Grove.

The dishes they produced were certainly quite unusual. Tapa-sized portions, not typically Spanish in style, apart from some ham croquetas with which I felt a white wine or sherry would have been preferable.

On the other hand Lalani’s LaKyrsiew Garden Spring Reserve 2011, a strong, dark, fruity black tea was great with a dish of seared tuna, ajo blanco and another of roasted figs with cheese foam and crispy ham (right) - though less successful with a more delicate dish of prawn tartare with egg yolk citrus sauce.

I wasn’t mad about the deliciously fragrant Silverleaf green tea (16th November 2011) from the same grower either with one of the next pair of dishes - fresh cod with a creamy pil pil sauce but it was great with seared scallops, cauliflower purée and grilled mandarins, suggesting umami-rich preparations and fruit work well with tea - and that perhaps creamy sauces don't so well.

And the other top pairing for me was the strong, savoury 1st Flush Jade Oolong from Jun Chiyabari Garden in Nepal with a langoustine and cep risotto with Idiaza cheese emulsion so maybe cheese is a promising avenue to pursue too . . .

The most enjoyable part of the evening though was tasting the different teas and learning more about how to serve them from importer Nadeem Lalani. They were poured from a rather beautiful single serve teapot designed for the company by ceramicist Billy Lloyd into Riedel ‘O’ Pinot Noir Glasses which enabled you to appreciate the colour of each tea and were served warm rather than hot as we’re used to having tea in the UK. “If tea is too hot to hold it’s too hot to drink” said Nadeem firmly.

So inspired have I been by the flavours you can get if you make tea at exactly the right temperature that I’ve invested in an electronic kettle so I can choose the temperature for each tea I brew. Experiments begin this weekend . . .

And even though I wasn’t totally convinced by the pairings the tasting did again show there’s far more potential to tea as a partner to food than just biscuits and cake or even Chinese food. Tea has a genuinely refreshing acidity, particularly at cooler temperatures and in some cases a useful level of tannin which helps carry strong flavours.

"Tea is the perfect drink to open a meal” said Nadeem. “You come in off the pollution of the street and it calms you down, settles your palate and awakens the senses.” As a tea merchant, obviously he would say that but it's hard not to agree.

You can experience the pairings for yourself this month at El Pirata Detapas. Lalani also works with other London restaurants including Gauthier Soho, Hibiscus, Zuma, Nobu, and Browns Hotel in which it has has introduced a Tea Library.

I attended the tasting as a guest of Lalani tea.

Photo by Do?u Tuncer

 

What bugs restaurant critics about wine service

To kick off my coverage of the first Wine & Culinary International Forum in Barcelona last weekend (and while I disentangle the many complex threads on food and wine pairing) here are some highly practical points which were made by a high level panel of restaurant and wine critics including Jancis Robinson, Victor de la Serna of El Mundo and Nick Lander, restaurant critic for the Financial Times and author of the recently published The Art of the Restaurateur. (My comments in italics)

* Reds are too often served too warm. One critic said 'you should never serve a great red above 16°'. And make sure you have an ice bucket available if the customer asks for one. VLS

* Restaurants tend to be too in thrall to fashion. A few years ago it was stocking too many heavily extracted, powerful wines that don’t go well with food. Now it’s wines that taste of cider or beer [i.e. natural wines] VLS

* Chefs should make more of an effort to understand wine. “Even Ferran Adria told me he never thinks of wine when designing a dish. The younger generation of chefs think the same way. They just leave the sommelier to solve the riddle.” VLS

* Never mind climate change, restaurants need to think about customer change and the fact that far more restaurant-goers are women. It used to be that you never went to restaurants until you were 35. Now 20-35 year olds eat out regularly and it’s the young women who decide where to eat. Women are much more adventurous eaters and drinkers than their male counterparts. NL

Sommelier vanity
* If you’re matching wines to the menu are you making it absolutely clear to the customer what you’re doing - and are you doing enough to show them how easy it is to pair a glass of wine? You need to manage your sommelier’s vanity. NL [In other words don’t let them shroud the subject in mystique]

Josep Roca of El Celler de Can Roca touched on this in his presentation too.

“You have to learn, you have to listen, you have to feel.”

"You have to be sensitive to the occasion and the reason which has brought your guests to the restaurant. If people come to celebrate you cannot interrupt with 14 different drinks as we normally do. If you have someone who is elderly pouring them too many glasses of wine may leave them fatigued. You need to give them something cool and something light."

"The best pairing is not always perfect for our customers. Better a pairing that evokes a perfect moment than a perfect harmony."

Jancis also commented on this:

"I worry that the more celebrated sommeliers become there's a danger they become so famous and so successful they don’t work the floor.

And I'm concerned about how much the average consumer worries about ‘getting it right’. Would something go wrong it you ate what you wanted and drank what you wanted? You can scare people off talking about the perfect match. Wine pairing should be about options. It’s not consumer-friendly to insist on a by-the-glass pairing if what they want is to share a bottle.

(Not sure I’d go all the way with Jancis here. I think many people are looking for confident reassurance. They’re often happy to go along with a pairing the sommelier suggests in order to have a new experience. But obviously they shouldn’t be pushy about it.)

Greedy wine mark-ups
As a wineloving consumer I get weary of the extent to which wine is expected to bankroll restaurants. It’s worked for grand restaurants in the past but now people can check on their phones in an instant to see what the retail price is. And fewer and fewer customers are on generous expense accounts. JR

Don’t turn down the lights to such an extent that your customers can’t read the wine list. This recently happened to us at a celebratory meal where we were ordering good wines and resulted in the restaurant losing the opportunity to sell us a dessert wine. Poor lighting shows a lack of respect for wine. NL

Update your list regularly There’s no excuse for presenting lists with wines crossed out. Nowadays it’s easy to update and print out a new list. JR

Give everyone a wine list. Restaurants typically give them to only one person at the table but it can cause awkwardness and confusion if only one person knows the price. The easiest way to get round this is to combine the menu and the wine list. NL (Good point and so simple to do!)

How far can you go with BYO?
And a tip for for customers in response to the question “can you take your own wine to a restaurant that doesn’t do BYO? Jancis reckons you can:

“It’s obviously rude to take along wine for the whole meal but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t take along a special red for the main course, for example, if you telephone first and agree corkage. And it would be courteous to offer the owner/chef/sommelier a taste."

I was invited to attend the Wine & Culinary Forum by the main sponsor, Bodegas Torres.

Is there anything that annoys you about wine service. Have our critics got it right or is it the chef's ego that's the problem not the sommelier's?!